Petit Dejeuner

Gabriel loves a big Saturday breakfast on the weekends. It's not the English breakfast with sausages, bacon, eggs, beans, grilled tomato, etc. etc but a sort of Swiss thing with "oeufs en cocotte" (soft-boiled eggs), an array of cheeses (here you see clockwise from top: St. Marcellain, Pont L'Eveque, and some kind of goat cheese) toast, coffee and orange juice. This was a weekend staple in Minneapolis but in Italy we almost never have this because Gabriel, cheese expert accustomed to great varieties in Switzerland, finds that most Italian cheeses kind of taste the same. Not bad, mind you, just uniformly salty and pleasant, the key word being "uniformly". So in Paris, we broke out the wonderful (if smelly) raw milk cheeses, the really buttery butter (yum!) and the award-winning baguette (literally!)and went to town. Both on this vacation and our honeymoon, we were priveledged enough to stay in a friend's vacant apartment in the 14th arrondissement very near a bakery that has won the "Best Baguette of Paris, 2004 as well as the "2nd Best Baguette 2003". It's a lot of fun to wait in line there first thing in the morning with all the other people in the neighborhood and get your baguette, petits pains au chocolat and any other pastry that you fancy.